Notes to Chapter 1Chapter 13 “Higher Argument”: Completing and Publishing Paradise Lost
1665–16691 Aschah Guibbory restates the last position in Ceremony and Community from Herbert to
Milton (Cambridge, 1998).
2 The house was split into two tenements in 1683, but was all one in Milton’s time. The
portion now shown as Milton’s cottage, set up as a small museum, contains the kitchen,
a parlor fronting the street, and a sitting room abutting the garden, set up as Milton’s
study.
3 In Defensio Secunda (CPW IV, 675), Milton described George Fleetwood’s brother Charles
as his longtime friend. Milton’s cottage was owned by George Fleetwood’s eldest daugh-
ter.
4 See chapter 12, p. 410 for Ellwood’s record of that friendship.
5 Masson, VI, 494.
6 Thomas Ellwood, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood, ed. Joseph Wyeth (London,
1714), 233. See pp. 450–1 for Ellwood’s perhaps inflated claim that this conversation
gave Milton the idea for Paradise Regained.
7 See chapter 2, p. 32; chapter 5, p. 123.
8 David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 21–31, 50–96, 213–47.
9 Torquato Tasso, Discorsi del Poema Eroico (Naples, 1594); Discorsi dell’Arte Poetica e del
Poema Eroico, ed. Luigi Poma (Bari, 1964).
10 See chapter 5, p. 124. John Aubrey heard from Phillips that he saw these lines “about 15
or 16 yeares before ever his Poem was thought of ” (EL 13).
11 My quotations and citations of book and line numbers are from the 1674 twelve-book
edition, because that is Milton’s final version and the one most familiar to readers. The
political import of the ten-book structure is discussed below; only a few new lines are
added to make the transitions.
12 Hobbes, in a surprisingly blinkered aesthetic judgment, declared: “I never yet saw any
poem, that had so much shape of Art, health of Morality, and vigour and beauty of
expression as this of yours,” predicting that it will live as long as the Iliad or the Aeneid.
William Davenant, Gondibert: An Heroick Poem (London, 1651), 86.
13 For the story, see chapter 8, p. 288 and note 53.
14 Davenant, Gondibert, 25.
15 See, for example, Robert Herrick, Hesperides: or the Works both Humane and Divine
(London, 1648); Henry Vaughan, Olor Iscanus (London, 1651); Richard Fanshawe,
trans. Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (London, 1647, 1648); and Izaak Walton,
The Compleat Angler, or The Contemplative Man’s Recreation (London, 1653).
16 Davenant’s dedication to his father, Charles Cotton, published later, suggests that he-
roic poetry and its values died with the king’s death. It puns on the loss of “Sovereign
sence,” and declares “Dead to Heroick Song this Isle appears.” See Lois Potter, Secret
Rites and Secret Writing (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 85–112.
17 Dryden, preface to The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards
(London, 1667), sig. A 2; it was produced in early 1665 and published in 1667. The
Indian-Queen by Sir Robert Howard and Dryden (January, 1664) treats the conquest of
Mexico by Montezuma, and the Indian Emperour treats the Spanish conquest of his
Notes to Chapter 13